Escenic Announces New Products in Use, in Development

The Athens-based producer of news, sports statistics and multimedia content for its own sites, all of Greece’s major mobile and SMS news services, and various third-party sites is the first Greek customer to use Escenic to manage content. It also has signed to be the first customer for the release of Escenic’s Widget Framework solution.

24 Media has a comprehensive rollout plan for the Escenic platform’s implementation at its sites and content services, beginning now.

The first customer already has launched a Web site powered by the Widget Framework on Escenic 5. Norway’s Aftenposten uses the framework to create a series of campaign sites that feature editorial content in an advertising context and layout. These advertorial microsites are linked directly from the Aftenposten front page.

Escenic also reports that Sweden’s S?dert?rns H?gskola university for journalism and multimedia will use Escenic Content Studio 5 to teach online content management.

The Netherlands’ De Telegraaf launched Escenic Tip Engine, enabling it to receive readers’ tips. “We’re getting more tips from our readers by putting a small tip logo at the end of certain articles. We’ve added in this way over two million daily readers of our newspaper and over one milllion visitors a day for Telegraaf.nl as a source of information,” De Telegraaf New Media Director Harry Bouwman said in a statement. “Using TipEngine also brings more efficiency into the newsdesk. One central point where mail, sms and mms is concentrated and distributed over our editorial desks and correspondents.”

Escenic is working Front Page Editor, for editing different types of content within the Web browser with “near perfect WYSIWYG.” In-page editing enables editors to tweak a site’s front page and other section pages in the browser.

Still in development, the following features are being considered for an early release: editing text of headlines, lead texts (e.g., to fix a headline that breaks over two lines); positioning text atop images, allowing editors to be more creative when designing fronts (with, say, unique teasers for the most popular stories); changing image dimensions so that editors can break out of a template’s mold where more fluid layouts are possible.